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NSA Can Break Internet Encryption Technologies

The NSA can see pretty much everything you do online as long as it’s not encrypted. That’s at least what a Snowden leak from last month claimed. The news spurred more people and businesses to sign up for more encryption services, but a new leak suggests that their efforts may have been all for naught.

The Guardian, in collaboration with The New York Times and ProPublica, report that the NSA employs a number of programs to break through the encryption software used everyday to protect the privacy of Internet users. These programs range from the use of super computers in decrypting files to outright paying companies to insert vulnerabilities into their own software...

More worrisome, however, are the back room deals negotiated by the NSA to ensure that it doesn’t even have to break through the encryption in the first place...

Here's how to best secure your data now that the NSA can crack almost any encryption

The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government’s behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security “exploitable,” and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.

To some extent, it’s not surprising to hear that the U.S. spy agency is doing spy agency stuff but, given the recent surveillance revelations and the fact that other countries likely have similar capabilities, the news is certainly worrying. To make matters worse, it came just a day after Pew reported that 90 percent of Internet users have taken steps to avoid surveillance in some way.

DuckDuckGo, widely lauded as the largest search engine that protects your privacy by design, has just hit an average 4 million daily searches, so far in September. That's up from a 1.6 million average in March, and 1.4 million in September 2012 -- much more than doubling its average in six months and almost tripling it year-over-year.